Amsterdam’s Collaborne aims to be the Salesforce of design thinking

As Rita Abrantes, a UX manager with Amsterdam-based Collaborne sees it, many companies talk about innovation but few actually achieve it.

Collaborne wants to change that through easy to-use-apps applicable to any organisation.

“We are digitising the process of design thinking, making innovation sticky,” she said.

“Everyone wants to innovate, but only 6pc of people say that they are happy with their innovation efforts. That’s a huge gap. If a company only achieved 6pc of its sales goals it would go out of business pretty fast.”

We caught up with Abrantes at the Uprise Festival for start-ups in Amsterdam.

‘You could say we have gamified the design thinking process’– RITA ABRANTES, COLLABORNE

The young company is moving fast and counts companies all over the world as customers, including the City of Amsterdam, Vodafone and the World Economic Forum.

As Abrantes explains it, Uber has become a signature example of how digital is disrupting traditional industries, and businesses that had been existing for years are now under pressure to do something new or go out of business.

“This is a tool that helps a company walk through the design-thinking process and achieve goals along the way.

“We have digitised the design-thinking process. It starts by doing a brief, then it enters the sensing phase, followed by the visioning phase, through to the prototyping and scaling phase. It gives teams a set of missions to go through the process in a fun way. You could say we have gamified the design-thinking process.”

The start-up, which Abrantes describes as fully-funded, rates itself by its ability to help organisations achieve their innovation goals and Abrantes said that user feedback is constantly pushing the company to improve its apps.

Apps are sold to organisations on a per-seat basis.

“You could say we are the Salesforce.com of design thinking. While they help companies to sell, we help companies with design thinking and to achieve their innovation goals.”